Olivia hard at work...

along the way...
my finished
close-up

Olivia's finished art

This morning I was blog-surfing and spent a while on a blog called "Seaside Dreamer." It belongs to the very talented Beth and is full of eye candy and cool tutorials. She has wonderful posts so check her out. While there I stumbled upon another great site you need to spend some time on---artsymama. One post led to another and before I knew it I had spent way too much time on the computer. Ever done that? :) lol

Anyway, as it turns out (and as I learned on their blogs and you can see examples there) there is a really cool way to get your creative spark going (learned originally in Sally Jean Alexander's book "Pretty Little Things") and that is to write some art techniques on pieces of paper and put them in a bowl...techniques like "paint" "draw" "stamp" ... you select a piece of paper from the bowl and you do what it says...my daughter, Olivia (7) and I decided to try this. Olivia let me chose our theme and it was "home."

First Olivia drew from the bowl the word "paint." We chose our paints and got to work. Then came draw, pastels, write, scratch, paper, smudge, pencil, text, charcoal.....and so on....

We spent several hours doing this. She looked at me at one point and said, "Mom, I am so in the zone." Yeh, that's my girl!

Several firsts for me on this--first time using a charcoal pencil and first time using an actual vintage photo in my art, not a copy but the real thing. It is a small, damaged picture so I shouldn't have worried but I did....at least she is being enjoyed and not in the bottom of a box somewhere. :)